TICK: A Content Management System Framework
for Semantic Web Research and Instruction
Robert W. McGrail and S. Rebecca Thomas
Bard College Laboratory for Intelligent Data Systems
P.O. Box 5000, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
mcgrail@bard.edu, thomas@bard.edu
data into the Semantic Web. TICK is a step in this
direction.
The authors propose a semantically
sophisticated data manager built upon an existing content
management system (CMS). TICK will serve as a test bed
for computer science courses as well as student and faculty
research projects.
Abstract
The goal of the TICK data management system is to make
online publication of the fruits of research as easy as the
publication of opinions on weblogs. In order to avoid the
reinvention of many useful features, TICK leverages an
existing content management system. This system already
provides a framework for undergraduate research projects at
Bard College. It is the authors’ position that the TICK
system also presents an appropriate platform for integrating
Semantic Web instruction into undergraduate coursework.
This article provides an overview of TICK along with a plan
for integrating TICK into our computer science program.
TICK Architecture
The OpenCms content management system (Butcher,
2006) forms the basis of TICK. It is based on Java
(Gosling & McGilton, 1996) and employs Java Server
Pages (JSP) as its template language. OpenCms supports
code reuse through modules, which bundle templates,
custom XML formats, and configuration files.
An
OpenCms microsite is a module defining a site of low to
moderate complexity.
Introduction
The TICK (TICK Is Collaborative Knowledge) data
management system is a project of the Laboratory for
Intelligent Data Systems at Bard College. The goal of
TICK is to harness Semantic Web technology (Hendler,
2005) in order to ease the online publication of scientific
research data and results, assisting scientific researchers in
the same way that blogging software assists amateur
political pundits.
The genesis of the TICK system lay in a senior research
project that led to collaboration between the Ecology of
Lyme Disease Laboratory at the Institute of Ecosystems
Studies and Bard computer science faculty in 2001 (Shaw
et al, 2003). Through this interdisciplinary work, the
authors were exposed to a very substantial corpus of
research data in need of major reorganization. The period
since that time has witnessed the formation of the field of
ecological informatics, which includes the application of
Semantic Web technologies to the biological sciences
(Finin & Sachs, 2004). Notable developments in this area
include the SPIRE meta-project (Sachs et al, 2006).
Nonetheless, a wide gap persists between such advances
in Semantic Web technology and the computational tools
readily accessible to the average researcher. The authors
believe that the time has come for a lightweight, userfriendly system that facilitates the integration of research
TICK Modules
TICK will consist of several OpenCms templates
supporting a collection of new microsite modules. The
Faculty and Research Laboratory microsites will house
research data. The Seminar microsite is included in order
to attract more research-minded academic users to TICK.
Seminar. An instance of this microsite is intended to
serve as the online home for an academic seminar,
colloquium, or other similar event. It employs XML for
configuration details and basic seminar information. A
seminar also utilizes a custom XML format for the
announcement of public presentations. Presentations are
syndicated via RSS (Winer, 2005). The seminar microsite
will serve as a simple, complete model microsite for
newcomers to TICK and OpenCms.
Faculty. This microsite represents the online professional
home of a faculty member. It has a rich array of XML
formats, most of which pertain to the various types of
academic publications:
journal articles, conference
proceedings, books, technical reports, etc. Publications
will have several RSS feeds corresponding to, say, lists of
recent or selected publications. Other XML formats
include news announcements and student worker position
descriptions.
A faculty member’s website will be
Copyright © 2007, American Association for Artificial Intelligence
(www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
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automatically subscribed to the RSS feeds associated to
their Seminar and Research Laboratory sites.
Research Laboratory.
The Research Laboratory
microsite is a collection of OpenCms elements that support
the dissemination of academic research. XML formats
include
general
news
items
and
conference
announcements, as well as the full range of academic
publication types. Adjunct to this module is the research
project microsite. A new research project is created from
within an existing research laboratory site and is attached
to the lab site’s navigation tree.
Conclusions
The status of the TICK system as of February 2007 is as
follows. There is a working prototype of the Seminar
module. Several templates and XML formats have been
implemented for the Faculty and Laboratory modules. The
introductory Semantic Web course will provide impetus
for further development of these modules.
It is imperative that the project team balacce the utility
of TICK with its correctness as well as its user-friendliness
relative to its target user base. We must be careful about
the early choice of research domains to serve. We will
focus on knowledge management in finite universal
algebras (Burris & Sankappanavar, 1981).
Many
researchers within this area are quite computationally
savvy, owing to their liberal use of computer algebra
software. Also, the complexity of research data within
this field (operation tables) is very manageable compared
to those of the natural sciences.
TICK and Computer Science Courses
This section describes some points of intersection between
the TICK project and the Bard College computer science
program. The authors would like to stress that these
activities do not collectively constitute any structural
adjustment to our computer science curriculum. Indeed,
each course and research project described below fulfills
some mandate within our current program.
Introduction to Computing: Semantic Web. This course
is a primer on XML technologies for a general audience.
Students complete a series of laboratory and homework
exercises that prepare them to build blog-style community
websites, which will be implemented as instances of
OpenCms microsite modules.
Participants will first
develop some simple static HTML web pages. Next they
introduce new XML formats using XML Schema, and then
build XSLT specifications to translate their XML profile
data into HTML. JavaServer Pages are then introduced to
add dynamic functionality. This strongly motivates the use
of Java. The course then proceeds as an introduction to
basic Java programming.
Databases. Recent trends in undergraduate database
textbooks reveal dwindling interest in the object-oriented
data model coupled with increased interest in semistructured data (Ullman & Widom, 2002). In this spirit,
the next iteration of the databases course at Bard College
will place equal emphasis on the relational, entityrelationship, and semi-structured data models. New early
laboratory exercises will focus on the design of XML
formats for the TICK project.
Topics in Advanced Artificial Intelligence. The next
version of this course will concern the use and
development of ontologies. Since the audience for the
course is advanced students, it is perfectly appropriate to
dedicate a significant portion of the course to research
problems arising from TICK.
Undergraduate Research. Two of our current seniors are
conducting senior research projects under the TICK
umbrella. One student is developing a semi-automatic
system for generating custom XML formats from direct
user interaction. The other is applying clustering
algorithms to the categorization of research documents.
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